[Banshee-List] Thinking about audiobooks

[David Nielsen <gnomeuser gmail com>]

Something has been on my mind for a while now, I happen to like audiobooks and yet no player really seems to handle them well. 

The typical scenerio would be buying an audiobook on CD, then importing it into Banshee. This however leads to several uncomfortable situations:

1) The audiobook is processed by mirage taking up CPU time.
2) The audiobook is added as music, unknown music as typically nobody has entered musicbrainz data.

There is also the option of buying audiobooks online from a vendor like Audible however it is my understanding, having never tried this, that the files are riddled with DRM and are only available in proprietary formats. A situation that isn't all together desirable or flexible.

In the typical scenerio there is also the problem that most audiobooks on cds are not divided up into chapters but rather 5 mins or so pieces without any real relationship to the actual material (for added fun try playing those back on a portable player with crossfade enabled by default.. it's.. entertaining). For long books this gets especially uninteresting to keep track off.

Ideally we would transform a series of meaningless single tracks into one book wrapper with artwork. Tools like bookmarks can be used to track how far one is in every book within Banshee (how does one transfer this to a portable player.. is there a standard I wonder). As they are not music, nor podcasts or videos they also really do belong in their own catagory, which also gives us some freedom to play with the elements to find the best way of presenting ones bookshelf. It might also be nice to let the user publish this bookshelf to a webservice (surely one exists, weRead on facebook e.g. does this but only for paper books I believe) or via the SoC telepathy data sharing project to let people know what books you are currently listening to and what you think of them. Adding a little bit of social sugar is always nice.

How would we go about doing this I wonder?

Kind regards,
David Nielsen